Barneys’ Simon Doonan puts down the glue gun

He isn’t in the Guinness Book of World Records, but Simon Doonan is one of the longer-running window dressers our country has ever seen.

For 25 years he’s been using staple guns and glue guns to work magic in the windows of Barneys New York, as the chain’s creative director.

No more.

Laura Morton/Special to the Chronicle

Up, up and away: Simon Doonan (left) has been promoted to creative director at large at Barneys New York. Here he is seen with Jonathan Adler at the opening of Barneys in San Francisco in 2007.

The store recently released word that he has been promoted to “creative director at large,” one of those vague titles that sometimes heralds a promotion and other times means the higher-ups just want to bring in new blood and move you aside politely.

Doonan told SFUnzipped that he has indeed had a career change and that it is all positive.

He is now a roving ambassador for the luxury specialty retailer, free to travel to various cities to build relationships with local customers and media alike.

“A lot of things I’m doing I’ve done before, but I’ll be doing more of them,” Doonan said in a phone chat from New York. “I didn’t have so much time to travel to the stores, I was so involved in my creative director role.”

Freedman, Doonan said, has new ideas for the windows. “He’s going to adopt a curatorial approach and have different people do them. I was pretty much designing them all the time. You were seeing my vision over and over again. He’ll have different artists, designers and creative people contributing.”